Michael Pollak wrote:
>
>
> > I dunno. My impression was that everyone who was there at the time thought
> that a distinct youth culture existed something, and that it had norms, and
> those norms were anti-war.
I was one of those who was there -- and we were in a minority. Among youth! Only a minority opposed the war. You are responding to the _noise_ that (a) that youth culture and (b) the anti-war movement (not at all the same thing) made. And all the noise the Liberals and Conservatives (both hot for war) made about our noise. All of which led to the idiocy you describe here:
> The New Right avatars in all their
> autobiographies whine like chainsaws about how they were a minority of a
> minority.
Of course. That is bourgeois custom. Not just in politics. At a time when hardly any critics wrote favorably of Pope, the critics who attacked his poetry complained about being in a minority and going against the current. During a period when 50 students took Milton courses for every student who took a course in Eliot's poetry, Milton critics wrote stupid essays trying to explain why "the modern reader" didn't appreciate Milton.
Those who accepted the War didn't have to demonstrate. Congress & the President took care of things for them. That is why the myth survives of the huge opposition to the war.
Incidentally -- it only takes 15-20% of a population to make a revolution. So the Capitalists were right to be scared of that small part of the population that was raising hell.
Carrol